Is the EU Responsible for its Eastern Neighbours, and if so, how? An Assessment of the Contested Roles of the EU as Normative Agency in its Relations with Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova

Following the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation in March 2014 and the outbreak of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, academic and policy discourse on the EU’s Eastern policy has taken a distinct ‘normative turn’. Discussions now increasingly focus on the responsibilities of the EU vis-à-vis its Eastern neighbours, ranging from the responsibility to protect the integrity and sovereignty of its Eastern neighbours, to protecting the ‘displaced’ and ‘vulnerable’ in the conflict, to the responsibility to ‘stabilise’ and ‘pacify’ the region and ensure European security more broadly. In this paper, I first map the competing conceptualisations of the EU’s ‘responsibility’ for Eastern Europe found in the discourses of the EU’s institutions and its (key) member states since the Ukraine conflict. I distinguish three ‘responsibility paradigms’ (cosmopolitan, liberal internationalist and neo-realist/geo-economic). Each paradigm contains different ‘texts’ on (i) who is assigned responsibility for Eastern Europe, (ii) for what these actors are held responsible, (iii) whether responsibility derives from ethical/‘local’ or moral/’universal’ responsibility, and (iv) which norms are invoked. Second, I analyse how each of the paradigms has entered the EU’s policy discourse. Drawing on Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and the concept/sources of legitimate normative 'agency', I argue that only the cosmopolitan understanding of the EU's responsibility yields legitimacy as it derives from relatively open and transparent deliberation processes at the EU domestic levels. By way of conclusion, I briefly compare the EU’s own conceptions of its responsibility towards Eastern Europe with those articulated in the neighbouring countries and in Russia. I conclude that the EU - should the cosmopolitan understanding of responsibility prevail in its relations with Eastern Europe – will find it impossible to move from legitimate ethical to legitimate moral agency without Russia subscribing to the principles of cosmopolitan world order.